Tweetdeck turns 2 years old, hints at a ‘multi-stream’ future

What started out as a quirky Adobe Air-based app that allowed you to easily see an overview of the Twitterverse has turned into an truly versatile, cross-platform social media tool and made a mini-celebrity (at least in tech circles) of UK-based founder Iain Dodsworth.

In a blog post today, Dodsworth marks his company’s second anniversry with some stats and some hints at the future direction of the company. The desktop version of TweetDeck has been downloaded over 15 million times, the iPhone verson over 2.5 million times, while the Tweetdeck servers sync over 7 million twitter search columns, adding 25,000 per day. In short, this is one popular app.

It’s the hints to the future direction of Tweetdeck that are most interesting. Dodsworth notes “We believe the future holds even more fast-moving streams of socially relevant information. Our mission is to help our users manage and harness these information flows.” In order to achieve this, the company is rebuilding its apps from the ground up to “truly multi-stream”, rather than what they right now – essentially a Twitter client with lots of extras like Foursquare and Google Buzz support bolted one.

If you’re wondering why the company’s long-hinted Android app is taking so long to arrive, the answer may well lie in it being the first embodiment of this ‘multi-stream’ approach. The Android app, Dodsworth says, will show that “The intersection of social networks, can be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts – or to put it another way TweetDeck should be more about what your friends are saying rather than the networks they are using to say it.”

Hopefully the rebuilt Tweetdeck apps will be much faster as a result of their new architecture. The latest versions of the app have felt majorly slow compared to earlier iterations. Now when’s the Android app landing, Iain?